"That said, we did have 50% in the past, and it DID result in much smaller rewards for content creators. "

We already have plenty of content creators, what we need is the best ones to be found and rewarded. For that we need actual curation to happen. Perhaps then we'd slowly start get people to visit Steem to see content and actually view it as a place where quality content can be found easily from Trending.

If Steem would work as intended, this ecosystem would be far larger, and content creators would be getting far more rewards than they are now or ever have before in here. However, we'll never reach that with the way this system is currently working, it's not working at all rather. We need curation to happen, or else every good author will leave anyways since they aren't being found and rewarded like they're supposed to.

Please consider long term effects, there's a lot of moving parts here and if we only consider the immediate effect to only one part of the ecosystem, we'll fail always in the long run.